"If I told you one of them was an informer," Russo continued, "a police informer, gonna put somebody in prison, and I told you, you must kill them, would you do that for me without hesitation?"

"He has to go," Floramo replied.

Russo's cocksure voice and Floramo's, at times nervous and hesitating, boomed over a loudspeaker in U.S. District Court in Hartford Wednesday. It was the first time that a tape recording of the Mafia's centuries old, quasi-religious initiation rite had been played in public.

The courtroom was silent except for the recorded voices. Jurors listened over headphones and followed the conversations intently from a typed transcript. The eight reputed Patriarca crime family members and associates being tried on racketeering charges did the same. About two dozen reporters and the packed gallery also followed along and strained to hear as well.

Propped against an evidence table was a chart with 19 color photographs taken on a quiet Sunday morning in the Boston suburbs. They depicted a tidy home at 34 Guild St. in Medford. The trees in the yard carried the last bits of autumn's color.

Scattered around the neighborhood, FBI agents and detectives hid nervously. Down the street, in a hastily assembled command post, another agent worried over a tape recorder, listening to the goings on within 34 Guild St. being provided by at least one secretly installed transmitter.

As noon approached, a big Lincoln stopped repeatedly in front of the home. It deposited groups of mostly middle-aged men. All but one were wearing business suits or sports jackets and ties.

The eavesdropping agent heard the coughing and small talk of 17 sworn Patriarca family members and the scraping sound of furniture being moved before Russo took the floor. He initiated four new

members into New England's dominant criminal organization. Floramo was the fourth.

"We have to ask, say once more," Russo continued, questioning Floramo. "This thing you're in, it's gonna be the life of heaven. It's a wonderful thing, the greatest thing in the world. If you feel that way, want to be part of it, as long as you live."

"Yes," Floramo said. "I do."

There was one difficulty Floramo was compelled to mention. He had an uncle on the Boston police force.

"But I don't think he ever made a pinch in his life," he said.

"That's all right," Russo said.

Then, the voice of Biagio DiGiacomo, with a thick Italian accent, filled the courtroom.

"Good luck, Richie," DiGiacomo said.

Then, as he had for those inducted before Floramo -- Robert DeLuca, Vincent Federico and Carmen Tortora -- DiGiacomo administered the Mafia's blood oath in Italian: "Io Richie, voglio entrare in questa organizzazione per proteggere la mia famiglia e per proteggere I miei amici. (I Richie, want to enter into this organization to protect my family and to protect all my friends)."

Floramo repeated the oath as it was administered by DiGiacomo. He swore never to betray the Mafia's secrets and to obey with love and omerta, the Sicilian code of silence.

"Which finger do you use to pull the trigger?" DiGiacomo then asked.

Floramo showed him and -- the FBI says -- the finger was cut to draw blood. Then, in an elaborate numerical ritual, similar to a game children play when choosing sides for ball games, the mob selected a "compare," or buddy, for Floramo, someone to stand beside him during the next phase of the ritual.

As a paper card bearing the image of the Patriarca family's patron saint was burned in Floramo's cupped hands, he swore, in Italian, "As burns this saint, so will burn my soul. I enter alive and I will have to get out dead."

"Come in alive and go out dead," one of the mobsters assembled around Floramo interjected.

The FBI considers the recording one of the most important pieces of evidence ever collected in its decadeslong fight against the nation's organized crime families. For years, reputed Mafiosi have said the Mafia exists only in the fevered imaginations of government agents.

Agents and government prosecutors say the recording is the best possible proof that the Mafia is a continuing enterprise designed to further its interests by breaking the law. The government's principal weapon against organized crime, federal anti-racketeering laws, requires that the existence of a criminal enterprise be proven.

Prosecutors hope jurors hearing the case in Hartford, as well as those who will hear testimony in a related trial in Boston later this year and others elsewhere in the country, will consider the recording just that proof.

The recording did not end with the conclusion of the fourth initiation Oct. 29, 1989. Russo, DiGiacomo, one of five mob capos at the ceremony and other high-ranking gangsters instructed the freshly initiated Mafia soldiers in the rules of La Cosa Nostra, or, this thing of ours.